The Kamala Harris boom-and-bust cycle
By
Byron York
August 8, 2024 10:15 am
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THE KAMALA HARRIS BOOM-AND-BUST CYCLE. If the polls are right, support for Vice President Kamala Harris, the new Democratic nominee for president, is booming. After months of President Joe Biden trailing former President Donald Trump in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, Harris now narrowly leads Trump. The last six polls in the average show Harris ahead. Although this is exactly what Trump’s pollster predicted would happen in the immediate aftermath of the Biden-Harris switch, it is still disheartening for Republicans.
How happy are Democrats and their allies in the press? Consider this, from a longtime contributor to MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Wednesday: “Watching the VP, it was mesmerizing in the sense I’ve never seen a rally like that, either on TV or in person. And watching it, you could just sense the power in the all — and it was the power of joy, the power of laughter, the power of hope for the future.” That’s happy.
But GOP strategists might take heart in what could be called the Harris boom-and-bust cycle, established the only other time Harris ran for national office. She was a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, but her campaign began and ended in 2019. Still, in one brief period, she shot up from back in the pack to close to the lead, only to disappear just as quickly.
Harris declared her candidacy in January 2019. By April, her support stood at 5% in the CNN poll of the Democratic primary race. (All the numbers here are from subsequent CNN polls, conducted with the same methodology.) By May, Harris had climbed to 8%. Then, in the June poll, she jumped up to 17%. There was no poll in July, but by August, Harris was back down to 5%. She meandered around after that — 8% in September, 6% in October, 3% in November — and by December, she was out of the race.
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/daily-memo/3114949/the-kamala-harris-boom-and-bust-cycle/
